Recent reviews by Balmora

It truly pains me to give this game a negative review, because for the first 40 levels, this was on the road to being my favorite game I'd ever played, and that's hardly an exaggeration. It was only after realizing how much tedium I'd have to put up with in order to continue further in this game that I realized that I wasn't having fun anymore. You see, the first half of the game consists mostly of exploring, finding new class crystals, exploring new areas, and collecting different things along the way, and your next big discovery is never too far around the corner. After a while, though, the platforming becomes so mind-numbing and tedious that, no matter how skilled you are at platformers, you'll be getting frustrated really quickly. The enemies eventually stop having new and fun mechanics, and devolve into obnoxious spammy disasters. For example, there are some specific skeletons in Land's End, which have the ability to fully revive one of their partners to full hp, at the cost of bringing them down to 1 hp. Why is this in the game? Like, genuinely, what about that is fun in the slightest? It just prolongs the fight when you think you've already won. The same skeletons can also paralyze you, which by itself would be fine, but it only adds insult to injury combined with the revives. Oh, and before you think about dodging them, they bolt at you at supersonic speeds, to the point that they're borderline impossible to avoid. This is just one of many examples of the game's tedious design, and I could go into plenty more depth about the god awful salmon run minigame, or the desert area which is so vast and empty that you'll get lost in seconds without a map (which, by the way, is locked behind an arbitrary sidequest). For a game that prides itself on being "grind-free," it really only means that literally. In every other sense, this game slowly but surely becomes a slog. The game does feature many amazing features, such as great music, lots of customization, fun bosses, great dungeon design, etc.... but those alone are overshadowed to me by the painfully tedious mid to late game.

I really hope this game improves, because man, I genuinely loved the first half, but I can't bring myself to enjoy it anymore.

suffering